LARRY Flynt is the most sought-after talk show guest on TV this week, even as he jangles the nerves of the people trying to book him on their shows.

TV producers were so skittish about what he might have blurted out on TV Monday night that no network aired his much-ballyhooed, live Los Angeles news conference, in which he was expected to reveal a slew of stories about Republican legislators and their pecadilloes.

“We knew that whatever he came out with was likely to embarrass someone [but] that wasn’t really our main concern – it was the libel aspect of it,” said one producer for a national network, explaining why his network didn’t air the news conference live.

But the event didn’t live up to its salacious billing, although what Flynt did reveal about one of President Clinton’s harshest critics – Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) – once again placed Flynt square in the middle of the national debate over whether or not to boot President Clinton for lying about having an affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Like an actor promoting a movie or an author hyping a book, the unpredictable publisher of Hustler turned up first on Monday night’s “Rivera Live” on CNBC, about 90 minutes before the news conference.

With characters like Flynt, news organizations run the risk of giving an erratic gadfly a platform to promote his peculiar agenda or, in the case of Flynt, a forum to make potentially libelous accusations.

C-Span – the one network that had previously announced its plans to air Monday’s news conference – backed out after watching Flynt on CNBC’s “Rivera Live” earlier in the evening.

The fact that Flynt revealed only part of his most recent findings on “Rivera Live” had C-Span officials worried that he may have been saving his most outrageous accusations for his own news conference.

C-Span eventually aired the 45-minute event on tape, in its entirety, early yesterday morning and late yesterday afternoon after officials decided they couldn’t be sued over anything Flynt said.

Flynt has made headlines since October, when he placed an ad in the Washington Post inviting women who have had affairs with prominent Republicans to tell him their stories for as much as $1 million per tale.

Revelations of marital infidelity uncovered by Flynt led to the resignation of Rep. Bob Livingston, the Louisiana Republican who was to have succeeded Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House, but resigned in disgrace.

It’s all part of Flynt’s publicly stated goal of exposing the president’s critics as hypocrites for hounding the president over his extra-marital hanky-panky then they themselves are guilty of the same thing.

Flynt became a First Amendment folk hero in the wake of “The People v. Larry Flynt,” Oliver Stone’s movie about his struggle against censorship, and now he’s become the nation’s hypocrisy watchdog. Many people find this newfound sense of civic duty strange, especially coming from the publisher of raw material like Hustler.

But, says a Flynt spokeswoman, that’s Larry. “He’s Larry Flynt. He likes the attention,” she says. “But this is honestly a heartfelt crusade for him. The hypocrisy in Washington is something that really offends him.”